Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin, or any of the fact checks showing what she just tweeted is false.

California Senator and likely presidential candidate Kamala Harris spread a misleadingly edited video of Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing testimony, falsely claiming Kavanaugh views birth control as the equivalent of abortion. From that, the argument goes, if Kavanaugh voted against Roe v. Wade, birth control would be banned.

Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake – this is about punishing women. pic.twitter.com/zkBjXzIvQI

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) is the latest Democrat to jump on the deception shuttle to, she hopes, the White House in 2020. She tweeted an 11-second video of soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in which he says, “Filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to.”

The problem? Kavanaugh was answering a question about and specifically citing the language of a specific case involving Priests for Life.

Harris takes deceptive editing to jaw-droppingly unethical depths by saying that Kavanaugh’s language, which is not actually his language at all, is a “dog whistle” for, she asserts, “going after birth control.”

Setting aside the fact that the right is not “going after birth control,” missing from this clip are the key words just before this clip starts: “They said.”

“It was a technical matter of filing out a form in that case. But they said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to.”

Harris’ falsehood was widely shared on social media, so much so that both Politifact and WaPo felt the need to fact check it. Both ruled it false.

Democrats rallied around Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s reference to popular contraceptive methods as “abortion-inducing” during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., tweeted an 11-second clip in which Kavanaugh said, “Filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to.”

“Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control,” Harris tweeted. “He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake — this is about punishing women.”

Harris cut an important second out of the clip — the attribution. Kavanaugh said, “They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objecting to.”

“They” refers to a Catholic nonprofit group, Priests for Life. Kavanaugh was answering a question from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about a case in which he argued Priests for Life shouldn’t have to provide women with the contraceptive coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act for religious reasons.

Some might argue that it’s a judgment call, open to legal interpretation, as to whether Kavanaugh “uncritically” used a term that riles advocates of abortion rights.

But a plain reading of Kavanaugh’s answer during the hearings shows that it is broadly consistent with his written opinion. One can question why he used the phrase “abortion-inducing drugs” rather than “abortion-inducing products” or “abortifacients.” But it’s pretty clear from the context that he was quoting the views of the plaintiffs rather than offering a personal view.

Harris’s original tweet, with the “they say” language removed, was slightly mitigated by the second tweet a day later, providing the full context. But there was no acknowledgment by Harris that the original tweet was misleading. She earns Four Pinocchios — and her fellow Democrats should drop this talking point.

Enter one Hillary Clinton today on Twitter, after all the evidence was in that Harris’ claim was false, including the Politifact and WaPo fact checks.

Hillary repeated Harris’ false accusation in a Twitter thread. This clearly was a planned out series of tweets by Hillary, not just a retweet:

As of this writing, there are almost 10,000 retweets, rising rapidly.

Hillary not only didn’t visit Wisconsin, she didn’t visit the truth on her repeat of Kamala Harris’ Big Lie about Kavanaugh.

She just doesn’t get it. She’s irrelevant. She’s of ill health. She’s BAD for her party. She needs a prison cell. She needs to Go. Away. She needs to listen to the 1st person who robbed her of her Presidency and realize “elections have consequences.”

I agree she needs to go to jail however at the pace the investigations are going and the tendency of not jailing “high officials” she will be dead before any indictments will be issued. So…..”At this point what difference does it make.”

What are you talking about? This is a classic lawyer’s argument. Kavanaugh did “refer to” abortion in that manner – by accurately quoting a party in a controversial case. Hillary then ascribes ill motives to the reference that actually happened, and makes it into not just pandering to dangerous right-wing elements, but dishonest pandering at that.

How do you produce a statement like this if you’re drunk? How? It has dozens of elements that have been carefully massaged and adjusted for public consumption. You can’t produce something like that by accident. It is by design, and only by design. Pardon the quibble.

I remembered the legal context of the post-Hobby Lobby cases as soon as I heard about the kerfuffle – I was instantly suspicious that the outrage was not well-grounded in fact. Mind you, I have some small sympathy for the argument “Well Judge Kavanaugh, you knew how your words would be received, even though you were technically quoting a party to a case – correctly at that.” This may in fact be the case. Wasn’t it during the Romney presidential run that liberals pushed that Republicans want all birth control banned because they view all birth control as causing abortions?

If Hillary wasn’t so monumentally deceptive in making her point, I would respect it more. I was just pointing out this isn’t the kind of thing you produce on the fly. It probably took days of strategy sessions.

“This is a classic lawyer’s argument.”
I have seen many a judge, and opposing counsel, come down hard on a lawyer using this “short quote” technique.
While my practice was officed in Los Angeles, I tried one case in Texas. At least back then Texas had a rule that allowed attorneys immediately to read the entire passage to the jury, to set things straight and, moreover, thereby humiliate the attorney using the short quote.

Harris’ perpetrated this fraud by editing out the first part of Kavanaugh’s statement, which made clear that he was quoting what litigants in a case had claimed.

As I wrote last time, while this was indeed a fraud, it wasn’t the main fraud in her accusation.

Yes, Kavanaugh was clearly stating the plaintiff’s position rather than his own, and it was dishonest of Harris to pretend otherwise, but her main fraud is that even the plaintiffs whose position Kavanaugh was stating don’t confuse contraceptives with abortifacients. They regard both as sinful, and objected to being forced to cooperate in the provision of either, but they did not confuse the two or refer to the former as the latter, and therefore neither did Kavanaugh in stating their position.

The drugs he referred to are not birth control as that term is generally used. They are not “The Pill”. They are specific drugs whose effect is not to prevent ovulation or fertilization, but to prevent already-fertilized eggs from implanting. Whether you consider that contraception or abortion depends on exactly how you define “conception”. The majority of the “pro-life” movement regard personhood as beginning from conception, but conception is itself a process that takes some time, and even within the pro-life movement not everyone agrees at what point in the process personhood begins. The RC Church puts that point early in the process, before implantation, so it regards interfering with implantation as an abortion. Others disagree. But none of that is relevant to drugs whose effect is before fertilization. Nobody calls those “abortion-inducing”, or seeks to have them banned.

“Quickening” is 40 days from conception — which happens to be right about when the earliest detectable brain activity begins. From that point, Jewish law considers abortion to be exactly like killing an already-born person, justifiable only in self-defense or defense of others, i.e. the mother.

And no, Jewish law does not consider abortion a “suitable solution” to a woman not being “mentally capable of carrying to term”. It depends on what you mean by “not mentally capable”. Abortion is only justified if the anticipated result of letting the pregnancy proceed will be a mother who is either dead or might as well be.